Bethesda’s new club will sell ‘premium’ mods for Fallout 4 and Skyrim

Creation Club has received a somewhat angry reaction

Shares

Over at E3, Bethesda has revealed a new initiative for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition which the company will use to push paid-for mods for both these hit games.

It’s called the Creation Club, and will offer a whole raft of custom-built content for the PC, PS4 and Xbox One – from simple skins or weapons, all the way up to new gameplay modes – when the system goes live later this summer.

Players will be able to purchase these mods from in-game marketplaces using special credits, and the latter will be bought with real money from the Steam gaming platform (or PSN/Xbox Live for console gamers). Said credits will be universal, meaning that you can spend them across both Fallout and Skyrim as you wish.

Naturally enough, there’s been a predictably angry reaction from fans who don’t want to pay for mod content which has previously been entirely free to download and use.

The YouTube launch trailer for the Creation Club has thus far accrued 11,600 dislikes (versus 1,000 likes) and a stream of negative commentary laden with plenty of lamenting on topics such as the relentless march of micro-transactions in gaming.

Creative defense

In its FAQ for the club, however, Bethesda is defending itself by insisting that this isn’t a system of paid mods.

The FAQ states: “Is Creation Club paid mods?”

The reply is: “No. Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content.”

It then adds: “Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators.”

Essentially, Bethesda is saying that all existing mods will remain free, and that free mods will continue to be made for both games. However, it will be producing its own mod content internally, along with some third-party mods from devs which will be heavily vetted, tested and polished.

But the flat-out denial that the Creation Club is a system of paid mods is rather confusing – since it clearly is, albeit with caveats – and again hasn’t gone down particularly well with the gaming population.

What this really amounts to, by all accounts, is the introduction of ‘premium’ mods and a two-tier system – paid-for mods either produced, or vetted by, Bethesda, and a second tier consisting of all other content which is free (not necessarily of a lower quality, we might add; just not curated by Bethesda).

Developers and modders can apply to get their wares into the Creation Club system here, and gamers can add their own thoughts to the growing avalanche of comments on YouTube.

E3 is the world's largest exhibition for the games industry, stuffed full of the latest and greatest games, consoles, and gaming hardware. TechRadar is reporting live from Los Angeles all week to bring you the very latest from the show floor. Head to our dedicated E3 2017 hub to see all the new releases, along with TechRadar's world-class analysis and buying advice about the next year in gaming.